“There is no vacancy in the governor’s office, because there is no resignation,” is what assistant Attorney General Stefanie Brand argued in federal district court yesterday.

The Attorney General’s office hung its whole argument on the fact that [NJ Governor] McGreevey has not formally submitted a letter of resignation, and compared the Aug. 12 announcement to the governor calling a press conference to announce he was going to veto a piece of legislation just passed by the Legislature, but that by the time the bill reached his desk he had changed his mind.

Can’t say my friend didn’t see that one coming.

Not surprisingly, McGreevey said he would discontinue his monthly call-in radio show, “Ask the Governor,” on New Jersey 101.5, because it is not the “appropriate forum.”

McGreevey has said he’s working on his legacy, to which Paul Mulshine states,

Here’s his legacy: McGreevey has done us all a great favor by disposing once and for all of the most pernicious myth in the state, the myth that we can solve our property tax crisis by raising the income tax.

. . . But it won’t be able to do so by raising the income tax. Let’s assume we doubled it and hiked the top rate to an absurd 18 percent. Rich people would flee the state, as some are already doing. But property taxes could be cut by only about 40 percent even in a best- case scenario. Many people would still be paying in excess of $10,000 a year in property taxes.

Meanwhile, the big jump in their income taxes would push them up against the dread “alternative minimum tax.” This is a tax the feds instituted years ago to close loopholes for the rich but which now hits the middle class. Unless it is repealed, middle-class New Jerseyans will lose the ability to deduct state and local taxes against their federal tax bills.

Paul concludes, “The point of government, at least as seen from Trenton, is not to serve the taxpayers. It’s to put your friends in jobs. And even that doesn’t always work out so great, as our governor has discovered”.

Jack, however, is asking Is New Jersey the next battleground state?